Donnerstag, 11. März 2010

Britain has the Falklands. France has Guadeloupe, Saint Pierre and Miquelon. The United States oversees Guam and the Virgin Islands. Tokelau is a colony of New Zealand. Morocco claims Western Sahara. But Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has vegetable patches.

On the edge of cities, in vacant lots, alongside rail lines and beside urban parks spread Germany’s verdant colonies. Across the country there are 1.4 million Schrebergartens. These ‘garden colonies’ are not unlike British allotment gardens, except that they’re not simply places for growing flowers and vegetables.

The industrial revolution, and the migration of people to cramped inner cities, devastated public health. In the eighteenth century enlightened souls began to make land available to help Europe’s hungry masses overcome food shortages by growing their own vegetables. About 150 years ago a Leipzig doctor, Moritz Schreber, advocated for the provision of open green spaces for urban children. But local youngsters didn’t care much about his ideas and his ‘Schreber playgrounds’ were abandoned to their parents, who took pride in cultivating them. The idea spread like dandelions across Germany, especially in the hungry years during and after the two world wars. In 1946 Berlin had over 200,000 Schrebergartens, or about one for every three families. Today a remarkable 4% of the city is still covered by private allotments.

Germany has almost five times more allotments than the UK. But these colonies are not simply utilitarian, as is generally the case in Britain. They grow flowers and vegetables of course but, rather than a simple garden shed bought on the cheap from B&Q, German allotments usually boast a small house with chairs, cooker and a vast selection of corkscrews and bottle openers. Many urban couples spend their weekends ‘on the land’, socialising with neighbours, organising barbeques and beer festivals, watching television and – oh yes – even doing a spot of gardening. The colonies themselves -- which have names like Cuckoo’s Nest and Sunbath -- are open to the public, who wander along their twisting lanes, eyeing prize courgettes and tulips over the fences.

The Berlin singer Claire Waldorf was a passionate community gardener. During the Weimar years she sang, ‘Wat braucht der Berliner, um glücklich zu sein?’ (‘What does a Berliner need to be happy?'). She answered, ‘’ne Laube, n’ Zaun und n’ Beet!’ (‘an arbour, a fence and a flower bed’).

Allotment gardening isn’t just good for the body and soul. It may well have helped to inspire one of the twentieth century’s greatest minds. A few miles up the road from my apartment, in Berlin-Spandau, is the Kolonie Bocksfelde. Here in the early 1920s Albert Einstein leased a handkerchief-size Schrebergarten. The great theoretical physicist called it his Spandau Castle and, according to contemporary reports, he was fully involved in the community, frequently calling on neighbours and visiting the colony’s restaurant. But his gardening skills were not as refined as his scientific gifts. In the end the allotment association grew disappointed by the standards of his weeding. ‘Dear Herrn Professor Einstein,’ the local authority Bezirksamt Spandau wrote to him in 1922, the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize, ‘You presently lease Allotment No. 2 on the Burgunderweg in Bocksfelde. It has come to our attention that this allotment has been poorly managed for a considerable time. Weeds have spread over it and the fence is in a bad condition. These oversights leave an unaesthetic impression. If you do not put your allotment in order prior to the 25th of this month, we will assume that you are no longer interested in leasing it and will give it to someone else.’

History does not relate if Einstein made good the repairs before he moved to Potsdam and then the United States to refine his work on quantum mechanics. But then, as the gardeners of Bocksfelde are still apt to say, ‘It’s all relative…’